Buona liberazione, Italia

Sorry (again) for the long absence.  Italy didn’t really change all that much after my last post, and to be honest, I was quite frustrated by a lot of what we experienced that I didn’t feel it was all that necessary to tell you about it.  Let me just sum things up by saying that all we were really told to do was prune the olive grove.  It seemed like everyone else had at least some say in what they were doing, or given the opportunity to relay their strong points, skills and experience.  Not us.  Compound this with the fact that our host made several attempts at avoiding to talk to us directly (IE: sending someone else to tell us something just minutes after she was in the same room with us), we frequently overheard her refer to us as “the Americans” in an unpleasant tone (despite the fact that she very well knew our names), and a few other things; we didn’t feel very welcome, and we were very much looking forward to leaving.

Too bad leaving required the Italian train system, which failed to work smoothly, again.

Getting from Rapolano to Siena and then to Florence was cake.  It went smoothly, we got on our first train for free, and they were roughly on time.  We felt we were off to a good start.  That is, until we got to Florence and the 8:30 train we were hoping to catch from Florence to Venice was sold out.  All classes.  Thankfully the automated ticket thing was wrong when it said that all trains were sold out, and we were able to buy tickets for the 11:30 high-speed to Venice.  Now, all of you are going to cringe when you find out what we did during our time in Florence, but we spent it in the most comfortable chairs we could find, trading off naps.  It just happened to be in a McDonalds.  The Florence train station didn’t have any lockers, so even if we happened to have had the energy to walk around and explore, we would have had to do so with all our bags with us.  Thankfully the McCafe had some delicious fresh squeezed blood orange juice, and the time passed relatively quickly.

The train from Florence to Venice was relatively comfortable, but packed.  Since I was the one who napped the least, I had a very hard time staying awake on the train, but Jon managed to pass out.  Fortunately for us, I managed to only doze; otherwise we would have missed our stop.  We got off the train, were assaulted by the Venetian heat, and set off for the ticket booth to buy our ticket to Vienna, Austria.

Well, let me preface this by saying that we weren’t in the lovely, ancient, sightseeing-worthy area of Venice.  We were at Venice Mestre, which is on the mainland, probably 15-20 kilometers away from any sort of canal.  Well, after asking for the next train to Vienna, we received two tickets for the 9:18 train that evening… over 8 hours away.

8 hours, in not-so-lovely “new” Venice.  Seriously?  After finding this out, we set out to see exactly what we had to work with, and found that the most Italian thing there was several Chinese restaurants and (as always) a halal place serving really lousy pizza.  Thankfully for us though, there was a lovely restaurant in the hotel across the street from the train station that offered free WIFI use with the purchase of a beverage.  We sat there for the majority of our 8 hour layover, and then moved to the hotel lobby when the place was closing to get ready for dinner.  I was grateful they didn’t kick us out.  While sitting there I managed to overhear the front desk clerk tell someone that the trains will be going on strike that evening at 9PM.  They seriously couldn’t wait until after our train left?  So, when we returned to the train station to wait out the last hour before our train, we were a little worried, but hopeful, that maybe we overheard him incorrectly, and were wondering exactly what an “Italian train strike” might be.

Well, after a ten minute wait at our platform, we saw another train for another destination pull in.  We saw this as a good sign, since a strike would surely mean all trains, not just the ones going to Vienna.  After about half an hour, our train finally arrived, we found our cabin, got comfortable, watched a movie, and passed out.  We couldn’t afford to pay for a sleeper cabin, but we were fortunate to not have anyone else in our cabin the entire duration of the journey… all 11 hours of it.  So far, Austrian trains are my favorite.  They’re comfortable, have places to plug in things that need charging, and their bathrooms are pretty clean.  All and all, not a bad train experience.  I woke up at about 7:30AM to the beautiful sights of the Austrian countryside.  I never had a mental picture of what Austria might look like before, so I was pleased to see how beautiful it was.

We arrived at the train station perfectly fine, got off the train and set off for the ticket counter.  The man at the desk spoke pretty broken English, but we managed to get two tickets from Vienna to Prague no problem.  We then stopped at a place in the station (just as comfortable, clean and convenient as their trains) to have some Wiener schnitzel and apple strudel and sat down to eat it and relax.  About half way through our schnitzel, as Jon was reading the train schedule, he realized that the train to Prague isn’t leaving from this station, and there isn’t a train to get from the station we were in to the station we needed to be in.  All this realization with only 30 minutes until our train leaves.  Well, some more reading led us to find that they have a metro system, and once we figured out where we needed to go, we got there with about 10 minutes to spare.  Same sort of train that we took to get to Vienna, only this time we didn’t have a cabin seat assignment.  We didn’t see any other sort of seats, so we just picked one and sat down.  Lucky for us, the 5 hour trip into Prague was made much shorter and more enjoyable by two brothers from New Zealand sitting in the cabin with us.  They told us that unless the train people kick us out of our seats to find new ones, we were welcome to stay with them.  We talked the whole way about a number of things, and only at the very end, as we were loading up our bags to get off the train, did we finally actually exchange names.  Funny how those sorts of things happen.

Getting from Prague to our host was fairly easy.  Czech is nothing like anything we’ve read before, so there was no guessing as to what the signs said.  Also, when the last train we took would make its stops, it would do so well before we could read the sign of our destination.  This was a little nerve wracking, since we didn’t really feel like getting off at the wrong stop or missing ours, but we managed okay.  After finding a payphone and calling our host, one of them was there within about 15 minutes or so to pick us up.  Finally.  Only about… 12 hours later than we had originally planned, but I guess it all worked out okay in the end.

Currently, I am sitting in a very comfortable bed in a hotel in Prague.  We’ve stopped here for the evening just after our two week farm stay, and head off to Germany tomorrow.  After all our sightseeing today/tonight, I’ll post again with an update on the time we spent in the Czech Republic.  Let me give you a little preface: great food, great company and real forests.  

Ulivi, yoga, sorgenti termali, pizza e la conversazione. Tutto bene in Italia.

Alright, now that I’ve properly vented about the atrocities of the Italian train system, I can tell you all about the lovely host we’re staying with.  The property is gigantic, she has a very successful veggie garden, a few (and by that I mean about 40) olive trees, and several houses.  It apparently used to be habited by monks many a year ago.  The host herself is a very wonderful, well versed and very well-traveled woman, I would guess in her 60s or 70s.  She has two sons that I am aware of, one who I will meet this weekend when he comes up from Naples (he spends his weekends here, but works there), and the other has been here with his wife and some others for a yoga seminar.  There are also four other HelpXers here, so it’s been considerably more social than our last host.  Not that her conversation was wonderful, but you have so many people to talk to here.

Our first day of work, we started with pruning olive trees.  If you know anything about olive trees, please don’t comment to tell me that I chose the wrong time to do this, because we know.  Basically, some of the trees (mainly the ones around the edges) have been a bit neglected for a year or two, and desperately need pruning.  Unfortunately, they’ve already started flowering, and once they start doing that, you can’t prune them any longer, for risk of preventing fruit (olives).  Well, it’s of a double edged sword though, because if we don’t prune them, they don’t fruit, but if we do prune them, the trees will go into shock and definitely won’t fruit.  I guess they’ve accepted the fact that they won’t be expecting many olives this season, and would rather prune them anyways rather than having loads of work next year.  I don’t blame them, but I must admit it’s quite grueling work.  Given the nature of the olive tree, the best branches make sort of an umbrella, so if you need to get to the base of the tree to cut out all the extra branches that are sprouting from the roots, you have a lot of bending over to do.

Last night they had an inauguration for a mosaic piece done for their big marble terrace, all a bunch of yoga business that I didn’t quite understand, but regardless it was beautifully done and made for a very enjoyable evening.  There were about forty or so people there, we met a nice soon to be med-school student from Ohio working at a B&B in a castle here in Rapolano, and enjoyed some songs by two of the people in the yoga seminars.  Wonderful voices, it was very lovely.

Yesterday started a bit more slowly, but with olive pruning again.  After that though, it very much turned into a lazy relaxing day for everyone.  The yoga seminar people and some helpers who wished to join did some meditation, another helper enjoyed a massage she won for figuring out the number of triangles and petals in the mosaic, and I just enjoyed the quiet.  Afterwards, a combination of us went to a natural hot spring, which was stinky with sulfur but very enjoyable, and then out for pizza.  It was really a very pleasant evening and I really needed it.  The day started with a bit of difficulty for me; I was tired for some reason, despite what I thought was enough sleep, and I wasn’t that enthusiastic about the work.  To be honest, I think I was feeling a bit homesick.  Enjoying some swimming, some pizza and some wonderful conversation really put me back into the swing of things, and I think I’ll be better for it today.  Unfortunately the yoga seminar people invited us to join in their yoga class this morning, but when my alarm went off I stretched out to release some tension in my back, and fell right back to sleep and missed it.  I’m a bit bummed, but alas, its not like I can’t do yoga by myself.

Also, a little side note: there are a lot of accents here at the moment, but a plentiful one is English.  I’ve begun thinking with a British accent.  Seems a bit silly, but I did start dreaming in French while we were in Nice, so I guess it’s not all that unheard of.  I hope I come home with a cool accent!